The Feeder Read Free Page B

hand and a painful lump forming in my throat, gazing at the cryptic message one more time.
    I analyzed the text message.
    ‘dont reply’ supported my theory that she was using her abductor’s phone to send me a secret message. If I replied, he would find out and she would be in deeper trouble than she already was. Okay, so replying was out of the question, but I took a moment to save the number in my address book for future reference.
    I will find you, asshole. And you will pay, I promise.
    I moved on to the next part of the message:
    its only way ul b safe
    Camille obviously felt the need to protect me from this steaming heap of human waste, but she didn’t realize he was the one who would need protection from me.
    bye odie
    That was strangely out of place, since she always called me Sammie.
    Odie was the name of the cat we’d had when we were children. Odie had been scratching in the big litter box in the sky for years. Why would Camille mention her now, of all times?
    ODIE!
    I jumped to my feet and spun around, facing the bed. The bed was like any typical double bed in any motel room. A mattress sat atop a solid pedestal, which took the place of the box spring. Different from our beds at home, but…
    I tossed my phone on the nightstand next to my sister’s drug paraphernalia and tore the bedding off of the mattress. Nothing. I lifted the mattress and looked underneath. Still seeing nothing, I flipped the mattress off of the pedestal.
    The pedestal was a plywood box with floral upholstery around the edges. The sides of the thing were solid, but at the head of the bed I noticed a space between the wall and the pedestal. I slid the pedestal back, seeing it wasn’t nailed to the floor and discovered a hollow space underneath.
    Camille had been using the space to hide a few things. As I retrieved the contents of Camille’s stash, tears welled up in my eyes at the memory of Odie.
    We named the calico kitten Odie, after the dizzy dog from the Garfield comic strip. All kittens are a bit nutty, but Odie seemed to take nuttiness to a whole new level. She did eventually mellow with age as most cats do, but when she was young she was tons of fun.
    Odie loved to hide. She could cram herself into the oddest spaces and then simply fall asleep. We often found her sleeping in closets, stuffed into boxes or balanced on top of clothes hanging in the closet.
    Odie lived indoors, but she often disappeared inside the house for a day or two at a time. When Odie made up her mind to disappear, she was like a ninja. She vanished until she was ready to be found, and then she would launch a sneak attack on the nearest pair of unsuspecting ankles. Cammie and I used to make a game of trying to find her. She had one hiding spot that mystified us for the longest time.
    We were playing with Odie one day, tossing a ping-pong ball for her to chase. She batted it under Camille’s bed and chased it underneath. When the ball reappeared but the cat didn’t, we peeked underneath to see what she was doing.
    No cat.
    We looked around the room to see if she had come out the other side and she was gone. We called her and tossed the ball around some more to get her attention, but Odie was apparently finished playing and had decided to disappear.
    I grabbed a flashlight and slid under the bed on my back to see what I could see and there she was. Odie had either torn or found a hole in the sheer fabric on the bottom of the box spring and crawled up inside. She had slithered between the springs and then curled up for a nap, using the fabric as a handy hammock.
    Over the years, Camille used Odie’s hiding spot herself, for various purposes. She stashed her Halloween candy in there when our mother confiscated the bulk of our loot after Trick-or-Treating to try and limit our daily consumption of junk food.
    When we were older, she hid cigarettes in there and eventually weed as well. When Camille was fifteen, she visited the free clinic to get birth control pills